MacRoscope (33 page)

“And it was right before,” Groton said.

“Let’s have the worst,” Afra said grimly.

“Well, first the liquefication we’re already familiar with. Then isolation of the individual cells, and a kind of gasification.”

“The gaseous state rebounds better after compression,” Groton put in helpfully. “Once molecular structure is reestablished.”

“And the field — that’s a simplified description — maintains an exact ratio during compression,” Ivo said. “That is, it fastens every atom in place and stabilizes things so that the entire field collapses evenly, and nothing is jostled or mixed up in the irregular currents of collapse. Much the same as spots on a full balloon will shrink in place when it is deflated, but not if it pops. After the — jump — the field maintains the ratios for the expansion, and only lets go when everything is as it was before. The machinery can take it all right; the extra flexibility for living things is required — because they are living. You can’t turn life off and turn it on again. Not in the normal course.”

“You say the larger the accompanying mass, the easier the procedure,” Afra said, becoming seriously interested. Large concepts came more readily, after the success of the melting and the Triton colony machinery. “Does that mean you’re going to try to fasten onto — well, Schön, — and compress us with it?”

“You have the idea, but we have larger masses at hand, and the equipment will be geared for them. The larger the mass, the less sophisticated the necessary technology, because of the smaller compression ratio. So—”

“Triton itself? That may be simple, but it
is
ambitious.”

“Neptune.”

She seemed beyond surprise. “Do you know where we’ll emerge?”

Ivo looked at Groton, who shrugged. “We don’t. The maps have changed in three million years. The expansion of space hasn’t stopped. Even if the convolutions were constant, the arrangement of stars and galaxies keeps shifting. We need a contemporary projection — and there isn’t any available on the macrosphere.”

“So we simply punch through and hope for the best?”

“Yes. After a number of tries, we should be able to set our own map, and perhaps to extrapolate reasonably.”

“Suppose we land inside a star?”

“The odds are vastly against it. But there seems to be provision for it even so; apparently matter will slide off other matter, when jumping. Path of least resistance means it is easier to punch through to an unoccupied spot than to double up on a star or planet or even a dust nebula that is indenting space on the other side. So we don’t have to worry about it at all.”

“Suppose we get lost?”

“We can’t get lost as long as we have the macroscope. Not for long, anyway. The galaxy may look strange from another location in space, but we do have a rough notion of its present layout.”

“Do you?” Afra inquired. “Did you stop to think that a fifteen thousand light-year jump — to pick the kind of figure we’ll be dealing with if we are to reach the destroyer — is like traveling fifteen thousand years into the future? All you’ve seen to date is the past history of a fragment of the universe. Your ‘present layout’ may be useless in determining your position.”

“We’ll still have the programs; most of them are galactically dated. And of course there’ll be the destroyer signal. Ill-wind department; we want to abolish it, so we use it for orientation.”

“What makes you believe there is only one destroyer?”

Again Ivo and Groton exchanged glances. “We can always fix on the Solar system,” Groton said. “We’re pretty familiar with that. We can estimate how far we’ve gone by judging how Earth appears, and of course the fix on Earth will establish our direction. With azimuth and measurement—”

“With all due respect, gentlemen,” Afra said briskly, “you are sadly inundated if not totally submerged. You may not even be able to
locate
ol’ Sol from fifteen thousand light-years’ removal. The configurations will be entirely different, and Sol’s absolute magnitude is not great. Let alone the strong possibility of obscuration by intragalactic dust and gas. As it is, we can only see, telescopically, one-thousandth of the Milky-Way center, and the dust is worse at the fringes. The macroscope is much better, of course, but—”

“Translation:” Groton said. “ ‘We men are all wet; we’ll get lost in a hurry.’ ” Beatryx gave him a smile — and, surprisingly, so did Afra.

“How would
you
handle it?” Ivo asked her.

“First I would orient on some distinctive extragalactic landmark such as the Andromeda galaxy. That’s two million light-years away, in round figures, and if we jump farther than that we won’t need to worry anymore about local affairs like destroyers. Then I’d fix on certain Cepheids, and look for the configurations typical of this general area — say, within a thousand light-years of Sol. Once I had identified the Pole Star I’d be within a hundred parsecs—”

“Andromeda being another galaxy like our own, only larger,” Groton said to Beatryx. “We should be able to see it from almost anywhere, because it is outside of and broadside to ours. The Cepheid variables—”

“
I’ll
explain what I mean, thank you,” Afra said. “A Cepheid is a bright star that gets brighter every so often — regularly, as though it has a heartbeat. And the longer a star’s period — that is, the time it takes to go from dim to bright and back again — the greater its absolute magnitude. Its real brightness. So all we have to do is measure its brightness as seen from our location and keep track of its period and we can figure out how far away it is. Because a star that is far away looks dimmer than one that is close.”

“Why yes,” Beatryx said, pleased. “That’s very clear.”

Ivo said nothing, not wanting to admit that
he
had not known what a Cepheid variable was, or how it could be used to ascertain galactic distances. He had produced technological wonders during their stay on Triton, and the principles Groton had applied to his machinery were in advance of anything known by Earthbound specialists. Ivo had increased his awareness considerably during all this, but his participation had been that of a stenographer. He had no real idea of content. He had
done
it, but he didn’t
understand
it. The result was detailed technical knowledge in some areas buttressed by appalling gaps in related areas. He could talk about gravitational collapse, yet not know what a Cepheid was.

And how much of Earth’s civilization was exactly like that, he wondered. Doing Without comprehending — even when this was tantamount to suicide?

“When,” Beatryx said, “do we go?”

It was four months of intense effort, mental, physical and emotional — but the group was in harness again, and profiting thereby. The members lived and worked in comfort, but the hours were savage. No longer did anyone do laundry or cooking by hand; that wasteful practice had been shoved aside in the rush.

Beatryx became mistress of the automated life-services equipment so that the others were free for full-time labors. She also learned how to supervise the connection-soldering machines and circuit-assemblers, making sure that each quality-control dial registered favorably for each completed unit.

Ivo traveled the galaxy via the macroscope in search of critical bits of information, since the intergalactic broadcast seemed to assume that the supportive techniques were already known; he also transcribed ponderous amounts of backup data.

Afra received much of this material and spent many days with the macroscope computer verifying tolerances, vectors and critical ratios. She admitted that the essential theory of it was beyond her; she was merely adapting established processes to their needs and confirming its applications.

Groton took her results, made up diagrams of his own, and tuned in the waldoes. He also supervised a complete survey of the globe of Triton, and selected particular locations with extreme care for the construction of enormous mechanical complexes. A visitor would have thought the planet to be the site of a burgeoning industrial commitment. In certain respects it was.

They were participating in superscience: Type III technology. None of them comprehended more than a fraction of it But by accident or cosmic design, they were a team that could do the job, with the overwhelming assistance of the supervising programs from space. The first crude waldoes had given way to tremendous mechanical beasts that roved Triton as though the human element had been dispatched, and computers superior to the one the macroscope employed were now in routine service — but the incentive lay with the human component. Ivo, Afra and Groton became immersed in their separate areas and did not communicate directly with each other for days at a time, and too often the contacts were irritable, for all were chronically overextended. Beatryx, with her invariably ameliorative personality, kept them in touch, and this was as necessary a function as any of the others.

The action became impersonal, for the project was much larger than they were, and the entire group had become merely the implementing agency. Yet Ivo watched what was happening and took pride in it, and he was sure the others did too. He knew that though Earth had largely forgotten their spectacular theft — the news
had
leaked out, making them momentarily infamous — the completion of their effort would leave the Earth-based astronomers and physicists gaping.

The nature of the work shifted. Excavators burrowed into the lithosphere of Triton, casting up fragments of rock in a null-gravity field. A hole formed, deepening day by day: a deep hole, braced by immense metallic tubing. The borer advanced at the rate of just over ten miles per day, the ejecta spouting forth in a geyser of grit and raining down steadily upon the normal-gravity torus surrounding the hole.

In time the tunnel, sixty feet in diameter, achieved the limit of depth the planet would tolerate. Metallic alloys could not prevent implosion beyond this point, and a force-field was unpractical in the neighborhood of the existing null-G field.

The machines finished their business and retired. For a time activity diminished. Triton was at peace again.

Then the shield of force that maintained an Earth environment around the tetrahedron home disintegrated. The foreign atmosphere puffed out, crystallized, and settled languidly upon the ground, dead as the erstwhile vegetation. The tetrahedron remained, sealed, in desolation.

A figure trekked from the disaster area, encased in a space suit. It paused where a grave lay frozen and passed on to the waiting module. It entered; the vehicle blasted away, and Triton was uninhabited.

On the moonlet Schön the reintegration of units occurred, and Joseph mated again with the macroscope housing. The ties cast loose; the ship-assembly drifted free of the ice, and Schön too was vacant.

The space-borne macroscope entered the null-gravity column, still functioning but splayed and ineffective at the thousand-mile elevation. The vehicle descended against the increasingly strong updraft of nitrogen and oxygen.

Near the surface of Triton the circulation became fierce; dust, debris and snow formed a tornado. The ship came down forwards, the macroscope housing leading, and nudged along on fractional power of the main engine.

At three feet per second relative velocity the ship entered the tunnel at the base of the windy column. The turbulence subsided around it. Buoyed by the escaping atmosphere, that passed with a five-foot clearance around the rim of the housing, the assembly descended, gently accelerating. The flowing gas cushioned it, preventing brutal contact with the walls. At fifteen miles per hour maximum velocity, the ship tunneled through the moon.

In three days it came to rest. The null-G column expired; debris filtered down. A nudge from the hot jets, no longer leashed at minimal power; the metallic restrainers, designed for exactly this failure, dissolved. The tunnel imploded, the action shocking back up its length and burying the ship a thousand miles beneath the surface.

Now the immense field generators came into play elsewhere on Triton. Three new null-G columns developed, spearing out from the advance side like the prongs of the Neptune symbol. The atmosphere, augmented by cubic miles of rock pulverized into dust and voluminous byproduct pollutants, rushed into the breach and shot outward in ten-mile diameter thrusts.

Triton slowed in its orbit, reluctantly, as the three vast motors braked it. Slowly it began to spiral in toward its primary — then gained velocity as its tether shortened.

The mighty gravity of Neptune embraced its minion and hauled it into its gaseous bosom. Great ruptures appeared in the sea-god’s ocean of atmosphere, torn up by the gravity of the spiraling ball. The tiny ice-moonlet Schön disappeared into that melee and did not reappear. Triton had lost its satellite, a moment before it lost its own identity.

Well within Roche’s Limit, that proximity that would have sundered a normally orbiting moon, Triton shuddered but did not break up. Events were far too precipitous to allow tidal force opportunity to take full effect.

Contact: the stormy exterior veil of the gas-giant parted. Ahead of Triton, crystals of ammonia-ice exploded into vapor as the heat of friction boiled the atmosphere. Behind, there appeared a turbulent wake five thousand miles wide, the crystals frothing whitely as they rematerialized in the surging breadth of it.

In five hours the moon had looped the planet at the fringe of its atmosphere and was entirely immersed in hydrogen. At fifteen thousand miles per hour it carved an atmospheric trench and looped again. On the third circuit it touched what had been the surface of water-ice and blasted it into steam. Water and ammonia thrust outward convulsively, throwing mile-long splinters of ice high into the storm, to warm and fragment violently again; sleet and boiling water and methane gas battled in the most violent conflation ever to occur on the surface of the planet.

On the fifth circuit the molten moon touched the solid portion of Neptune. At three thousand miles per hour stone met metal, rolling and melting. Now the wake was of bursting lava and precious heavy elements.

The ball that came to rest at last, embedded within a lake of liquid metal, was six hundred miles in diameter — but intact. Precipitously near its margin, like a worm in an apple, nestled the encapsulated ship.